Although the magazines gave me very good times, the real emotional education I got from them was in the editorial content. Hard to believe, I know, but Playboy was in a completely different league back then. My favorite magazine (September 76’) had the first chapter, in exclusive, of Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, an in-depth investigation into some of the darker aspects of the Watergate scandal, and a series of photographs by Helmut Newton inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else. Back then it was difficult to know if the content really needed the push from the topless models (something I did not object at all) or if the models, after decades, had become an excuse. The years made it plain: it was always a case of style over substance. But what has style become but substance itself, the crucible where ethics and aesthetics fuse together (2.3).

In the same magazine, a few pages before Miss September’s centerfold, I found a Cameron Crowe interview with David Bowie. I must have read it a dozen times and, truth be told, I understood it way more than Jarry’s pataphysical ironies. Bowie’s answers were quick and witty, he came through as both aloof and charismatic—a consummate dandy and aesthete. By then I had only heard Queen Bitch and another couple of songs from Hunky Dory. I was hooked.

Bowie understood perfectly well his condition of dandy-commodity (2.10); he was willing to become an object. An excerpt from the interview:

… what I did with my Ziggy Stardust was package a totally credible, plastic rock-‘n’-roll singer–much better than the Monkees could ever fabricate. I mean, my plastic rock-‘n’-roller was much more plastic than anybody’s. And that was what was needed at the time. And it still is. Most people still want their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys. Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and flitting onto a certain style of dressing for a day; that’s as deep as they wish to go. It’s no surprise that Ziggy was a huge success.¹

A proud heir to Oscar Wilde, Bowie’s success formula always was: “the important thing is they talk about you, even if it’s good.” From that interview I was always intrigued by a particular comment. When Crowe asks him: “you’ve often said that you believe very strongly in fascism. Yet you also claim you’ll one day run for Prime Minister of England. More media manipulation?” Bowie retorts in an almost weary fashion:

BOWIE: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, “Well, now, what ideas have you got?” Show them what to do, for God’s sake. If you don’t, nothing will get done. I can’t stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.²

“Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.” I kept the phrase somewhere in the back of my brain and I finally understood it a few years later when I saw Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will at college. Apparently Bowie had seen the same thing:

CROWE: How so?

BOWIE: Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And, boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country.³

A good look at any Bowie show from that era reveals the source of his tricks. Like the Führer he is brimming with energy, always about to explode, his moves are elegant and fluid but carefully choreographed, his concentration almost superhuman.

BOWIE: … People aren’t very bright, you know. They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler, because he would march into a room to speak and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock-‘n’-roll concert. The kids would get very excited–girls got hot and sweaty and guys wished it was them up there. That, for me, is the rock-‘n’-roll experience.⁴

As it turns out, it wasn’t the first time Bowie talked publicly about Hitler. In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe (again), the Thin White Duke starts rambling:

I fell for Ziggy too. It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn’t have been hard. Concerts alone got so enormously frightening that even the papers were saying, ‘This ain’t rock music, this is bloody Hitler! Something must be done!’ And they were right. It was awesome. Actually, I wonder … I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.⁵

Needless to say, since his arrival in Los Angeles Bowie was using alarming amounts of cocaine, he was deeply paranoid and believed Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin—with whom he had recently had a falling out—had put a spell on him. He even hallucinated, mid-interview, that a body fell from the LA sky. He had developed a fascination with Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and the Nazi quest for the Holy Grail; his Thin White Duke persona was part German Expressionism (a la Fritz Lang), part cold cabaret performer. Regarding his time on the threshold between reality and hallucination, he claimed that he could not remember having recorded his album Station to Station. Even if we blame his obsession with fascism and occultism on drugs, Bowie established the basic relation between the dictator and the rock star: their modus operandi in manipulating the masses is identical. What can we say?, maybe that “paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.”⁶

Bowie’s obsession with nazism started to wane when “in early April 1976, returning from Moscow with Iggy Pop, [he] was detained by custom officers on the Russian/Polish border when a cache full of Nazi memorabilia was found in his possession.”⁷ Later that year, wanting to go clean, he moved back to Europe and settled in West Berlin, another liminal place. Of his time in Los Angeles, he said: “the fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

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1. Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie: an outrageous interview with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch-hitter”, Playboy Magazine, September, 1976, 64. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 68. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 69 ↩︎
4. Ibid., 70. ↩︎
5. Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie: Rolling On to Rule the World,” Rolling Stone, February, 1972. ↩︎
6. Strange Days. Dir: Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: Lightstorm Entertainment, 1995. ↩︎
7. David Buckley, Strange Fascination, 250. ↩︎